In trials witnesses often slant their testimony in order to advance their own interests. To obtain truthful testimony, the law relies on cross-examination under threat of prosecution for perjury. We show that perjury law is an imperfect truthrevealing mechanism. Moreover, we develop a...

We investigate the effect of the split-award tort reform, where the state takes a share of the plaintiff's punitive damage award, on the firm's level of care, the likelihood of trial, and the social costs of accidents. A decrease in the plaintiff's share of the punitive damage award reduces the...

This paper deals with the precision of auditing standards under a negligence liability system for auditors. Auditing standards such as, e.g., GAAS in the US and GoA in Germany provide rules for judging the auditors' due care and are supposed to serve both descriptive and normative purposes. In...

The main goal of the court system is to differentiate between those who obeyed the law and those who did not. We describe a mechanism design framework that facilitates the characterization of a set of procedural mechanisms that would minimize the resources used to achieve this goal. This...

Witnesses often gain by slanting testimony. Courts try to elicit the truth with perjury rules. Perjury is not truth-revealing; truth revelation is, however, possible. With a truth-revealing mechanism the judge will get little testimony because the defendant will not present witnesses with...

We explore the sensitivity of the clinical decisions of physicians to the standards of care expected of them under the law, drawing on the abandonment by states over time of rules holding physicians to standards determined by local customs and the contemporaneous adoption of national-standard...

We consider what we call the Sheriff of Nottingham hypothesis : that the government of Brazil, which at the same time is party to litigated cases and the enforcer of tax laws, constantly enacts norms that seek to strengthen its side. We test this hypothesis and observe that litigants adapt to...

This article considers how judges' political and racial backgrounds intersect with offender race under the United States Sentencing Guidelines. Using variation in judges' political affiliation and race at the district level and significant changes to Guidelines enforcement, I find that...

We study how the presence of biased expertise influences judicial decision-making. When an appeals-court judge's decision depends only on the information he gets about the expertise proceedings, a perfectly separating equilibrium may arise in which the losing litigant appeals only if the...

This paper attempts to shed light on some factors determining the duration of disputes. To this aim a unique database is used, accounting for eight hundred judgments rendered by the Italian Regional Administrative Courts from 2000 to 2007. Our findings confirm that normative complexity hampers a...